Posts Tagged ‘censorship’

While I have enjoyed the recent Hollywood iteration of Marvel comics with movies such as Superman, Spiderman, Hulk, etc., I have never been a reader of comics books themselves.

Reading through my typical news articles I found an intriguing article about Apple banning a comic book based app called Murderdrome. Apple, according to the SDK guidelines, reserves the full right to reject any application which may be offensive to some people. It’s very concerning to me when content beyond the obvious porn and blatant gore is blocked from being available through the App Store.

If an international news application, not bound by domestic censorship rules, posts a graphic image of a war scene in their news application as part of an article — can this now embody Apple to remove the application from the App Store?

Due to lack of access, I have yet to preview the Murderdrome app to determine how graphic the scenes may be, but based on the YouTube video below it’s plan comics and far from any graphic or questionable content.

Presuming Murderdrome simply has a controversial name and their content was actually quite the contrary to from the name’s suggestion, would Apple have accepted the App? And if so, would they take it out afterwards when the content transitioned slowly to the more murderous scenes as the name implies. As you can see, it’s a very blurry line Apple has their work cut out for them if they are going to play the “Content Cop” in their App Store.

The matter of fact is this App is very revolutionary. Just by watching the YouTube video, I learned about the way comic are from pencil, to ink, to color — granted, one could have derived this through simple thought and this should probably indicate how distant I am from comics in general.

Bottom line though, Infurious, the makers of Murderdrome, decided to exploit the iPhone features to expose the entire process to the reader — an innovative feat clearly seen in their YouTube video.

In essence, they capture the three representative images for each scene during the stages of development (the pencil, inking, and final colorized step). As you interact with the comics by flipping through the screens, you can drill down to either of the three images by dragging down or up. So if you like comics with the pencil look, you have it. If you like comics in their full color mode — you have it to. If you are simply the curious observer on how they created a particular screen, stop and flip through the three versions accordingly.

This is simply another demonstration of how digitization enhances the experience of a traditional medium beyond a simple port.